Rohan: The late, lamented Penn Station featured in PBS documentary

The Record

THE RISE AND FALL OF PENN STATION

Penn Station was the idea of Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who wanted to link his railroad with New York City. He hired the firm of McKim, Mead and White to design the architectural marvel.

9 tonight, WNET/Channel 13

My fascination with Pennsylvania Station – the monumental, magnificent terminal that has been gone for half a century – probably started with a 1960 family train trip from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., when my 5-year-old eyes first beheld the majestic space that had been inspired by some of Europe's architectural wonders.

Penn Station's allure for me intensified in 1999, when I accompanied preservationists as they trekked through the Meadowlands searching for still-missing pieces of the old station – treasures that had been unceremoniously dumped in the marshlands during the 1960s demolition.

And today, I am often reminded of the old Penn Station as I pass between the eagles that once graced its façade and now guard the entrance to the New Jersey Botanical Garden in Ringwood, the town where I live.

Needless to say, I really looked forward to seeing "The Rise and Fall of Penn Station," an hourlong documentary from director/producer/writer Randall MacLowry that airs tonight on PBS, as part of the "American Experience" series.

And?

It's definitely good and it's fascinating, but it should have been longer. That's something I rarely say about any television show or movie. But in this case, it is so. There was not nearly enough about Pennsylvania Station itself.

More than half of the film's running time is devoted to the story of how Alexander Cassatt — president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and brother of American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt — gambled millions of dollars to link the nation's biggest railroad to New York City. When he became the railroad's president in 1899, trains went only as far east as Jersey City. From there, riders had to cross into Manhattan by ferry.

Cassatt's vision involved having intermediaries buy up acres of property in the West Side's Tenderloin district and undertaking the biggest civil engineering project of its time. He hired tunnel engineer Charles Jacobs to burrow below the Hudson and East rivers, to dig, in all, 16 miles of underground tunnels, seven miles of which ran underneath the rivers.

"Sandhog" construction crews, who specialized in underwater tunneling, worked on opposite banks of the Hudson – from Weehawken on the Jersey side – tunneling toward the center of the river. After three years of work, when the two halves met, their alignment was off by just 1/16th of an inch, thanks to Jacobs' acumen.

If the tunnels were a feat of engineering, the station itself was an architectural masterpiece. Cassatt hired renowned Beaux-Arts architect Charles McKim, of the prestigious firm McKim, Mead & White, who had designed, among other things, the Columbia University campus. McKim studied the Baths of Caracalla and other great buildings of ancient Rome and came up with a design that involved 27,000 tons of steel, 500,000 cubic feet of pink Milford granite (from Massachusetts), 83,000 square feet of skylights and 17 million bricks.

Cassatt never lived to see the project completed. He died of a heart attack in 1906 – four years before his Pennsylvania Station opened. Some 18 million people were soon passing through the hub every year. Increasingly over time, the film notes, they were commuters — many riding the Long Island Rail Road — and not the long-distance railway passengers Cassatt had had in mind.

A half-century after the station opened, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had steadily been losing passengers to auto and air travel, was financially strapped. And in 1961, the company announced it had sold the air rights above Penn Station. The great old building would be torn down to make way for a new Madison Square Garden and a high-rise office tower.

Demolition, begun on Oct. 28, 1963, took three years. The new Penn Station was completed in 1968, and architectural historian Vincent J. Scully famously expressed its inferiority to the original: "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."

Arguably the only good to come of Penn Station's demolition was that it sparked the modern historic preservation movement. Grand Central Terminal, designated an historic landmark in 1967, has been spared that sorry fate.

Although the film ends here, it is not really the end of the story.

After the mass dumping of architectural pieces in the Meadowlands in the '60s, some treasures were rescued, but others have not been found. During that Meadowlands hunt in 1999, I accompanied representatives of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corp. as they traipsed through reeds, layers of mud, brick and countless other discards, with the permission of the North Bergen trucking company that owned the property. With them was a man who normally helped law enforcement search for dead bodies, but had volunteered his services, and his surface-penetrating radar equipment, to search for buried treasure.

That day, they found nothing. But by that point, the preservationists had been sporadically searching the property for two years, and had found a few substantial pieces from the original station, including a large section of the building's carriageway, and three large pink-granite cylinders from an outside colonnade. Their hope was that these salvaged pieces could be incorporated into a new Penn Station, one that would accommodate 21st-century needs by making changes above and below ground. And 15 years after that Meadowlands trek, that still has not come to fruition.

There has been progress made. Under way now is the first phase of a planned transformation of the James A. Farley Post Office Building across Eighth Avenue — the 1912 landmark that was also designed by McKim, Mead & White — into Moynihan Station, which would primarily serve as a 21st-century inter-city rail gateway for Amtrak. It is named after the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who advocated the plan. Phase one includes the construction of entrances that would allow access to Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road through the post office. Funding for Phase 2, the actual building of a new train hall in the Farley building, is being sought.

Moynihan Station would be an extension of a new Penn Station, a world-class facility to replace the current overcrowded one. This would involve finding a new home for Madison Square Garden. Last summer, at the urging of the Municipal Art Society of New York and the Alliance for a New Penn Station, the New York City Council voted to limit Madison Square Garden's permit to operate above Penn Station to just 10 more years. (You'll find more information about all this at mas.org.)

Nonetheless, a New Penn Station remains in the distance.

And that makes the story told in "The Rise and Fall of Penn Station" — the feat that Cassatt, Jacobs and McKim accomplished in a decade — all the more remarkable.

Rohan: The late, lamented Penn Station featured in PBS documentary

Penn Station was the idea of Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who wanted to link his railroad with New York City. He hired the firm of McKim, Mead and White to design the architectural marvel.

My fascination with Pennsylvania Station – the monumental, magnificent terminal that has been gone for half a century – probably started with a 1960 family train trip from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., when my 5-year-old eyes first beheld the majestic space that had been inspired by some of Europe's architectural wonders.

Penn Station's allure for me intensified in 1999, when I accompanied preservationists as they trekked through the Meadowlands searching for still-missing pieces of the old station – treasures that had been unceremoniously dumped in the marshlands during the 1960s demolition.

And today, I am often reminded of the old Penn Station as I pass between the eagles that once graced its façade and now guard the entrance to the New Jersey Botanical Garden in Ringwood, the town where I live.

Needless to say, I really looked forward to seeing "The Rise and Fall of Penn Station," an hourlong documentary from director/producer/writer Randall MacLowry that airs tonight on PBS, as part of the "American Experience" series.

And?

It's definitely good and it's fascinating, but it should have been longer. That's something I rarely say about any television show or movie. But in this case, it is so. There was not nearly enough about Pennsylvania Station itself.

More than half of the film's running time is devoted to the story of how Alexander Cassatt — president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and brother of American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt — gambled millions of dollars to link the nation's biggest railroad to New York City. When he became the railroad's president in 1899, trains went only as far east as Jersey City. From there, riders had to cross into Manhattan by ferry.

Cassatt's vision involved having intermediaries buy up acres of property in the West Side's Tenderloin district and undertaking the biggest civil engineering project of its time. He hired tunnel engineer Charles Jacobs to burrow below the Hudson and East rivers, to dig, in all, 16 miles of underground tunnels, seven miles of which ran underneath the rivers.

"Sandhog" construction crews, who specialized in underwater tunneling, worked on opposite banks of the Hudson – from Weehawken on the Jersey side – tunneling toward the center of the river. After three years of work, when the two halves met, their alignment was off by just 1/16th of an inch, thanks to Jacobs' acumen.

If the tunnels were a feat of engineering, the station itself was an architectural masterpiece. Cassatt hired renowned Beaux-Arts architect Charles McKim, of the prestigious firm McKim, Mead & White, who had designed, among other things, the Columbia University campus. McKim studied the Baths of Caracalla and other great buildings of ancient Rome and came up with a design that involved 27,000 tons of steel, 500,000 cubic feet of pink Milford granite (from Massachusetts), 83,000 square feet of skylights and 17 million bricks.

Cassatt never lived to see the project completed. He died of a heart attack in 1906 – four years before his Pennsylvania Station opened. Some 18 million people were soon passing through the hub every year. Increasingly over time, the film notes, they were commuters — many riding the Long Island Rail Road — and not the long-distance railway passengers Cassatt had had in mind.

A half-century after the station opened, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had steadily been losing passengers to auto and air travel, was financially strapped. And in 1961, the company announced it had sold the air rights above Penn Station. The great old building would be torn down to make way for a new Madison Square Garden and a high-rise office tower.

Demolition, begun on Oct. 28, 1963, took three years. The new Penn Station was completed in 1968, and architectural historian Vincent J. Scully famously expressed its inferiority to the original: "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."

Arguably the only good to come of Penn Station's demolition was that it sparked the modern historic preservation movement. Grand Central Terminal, designated an historic landmark in 1967, has been spared that sorry fate.

Although the film ends here, it is not really the end of the story.

After the mass dumping of architectural pieces in the Meadowlands in the '60s, some treasures were rescued, but others have not been found. During that Meadowlands hunt in 1999, I accompanied representatives of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corp. as they traipsed through reeds, layers of mud, brick and countless other discards, with the permission of the North Bergen trucking company that owned the property. With them was a man who normally helped law enforcement search for dead bodies, but had volunteered his services, and his surface-penetrating radar equipment, to search for buried treasure.

That day, they found nothing. But by that point, the preservationists had been sporadically searching the property for two years, and had found a few substantial pieces from the original station, including a large section of the building's carriageway, and three large pink-granite cylinders from an outside colonnade. Their hope was that these salvaged pieces could be incorporated into a new Penn Station, one that would accommodate 21st-century needs by making changes above and below ground. And 15 years after that Meadowlands trek, that still has not come to fruition.

There has been progress made. Under way now is the first phase of a planned transformation of the James A. Farley Post Office Building across Eighth Avenue — the 1912 landmark that was also designed by McKim, Mead & White — into Moynihan Station, which would primarily serve as a 21st-century inter-city rail gateway for Amtrak. It is named after the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who advocated the plan. Phase one includes the construction of entrances that would allow access to Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road through the post office. Funding for Phase 2, the actual building of a new train hall in the Farley building, is being sought.

Moynihan Station would be an extension of a new Penn Station, a world-class facility to replace the current overcrowded one. This would involve finding a new home for Madison Square Garden. Last summer, at the urging of the Municipal Art Society of New York and the Alliance for a New Penn Station, the New York City Council voted to limit Madison Square Garden's permit to operate above Penn Station to just 10 more years. (You'll find more information about all this at mas.org.)